


Don't Cut It Short

by pineapple_split



Category: Nancy Drew - Carolyn Keene
Genre: F/M, category is F/M but romance is mostly sidelined, mention of a character who is brain-dead, probably spoiler for culprit of The Final Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-08-25
Packaged: 2017-12-24 16:28:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/942087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pineapple_split/pseuds/pineapple_split
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Really, it was all too easy to focus on First Prize and just not give a damn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Cut It Short

" _Don't_ patronize me."

"I'm not, Simone, I promise." Hal's voice, soothing as ever, floated through the line. "I'm just saying. No one's expecting you to hold up Mt. Everest on your back or anything."

"Why did you even call?" Simone answered, her voice wavering somewhere between exasperation and defeat. "I've already decided what I'm going to do. Conversation over."

The pause that followed lasted a few seconds too long.

"Putting aside the fact that this is _my brother_ we're talking about‒"

"‒Oh, I'm aware," Simone replied sardonically.

"‒I know you're not holding up nearly as well as you're pretending to."

Simone slammed shut her vanity drawer. "Do me a favor Hal: don't talk about things you don't understand."

"Oh, I understand you Simone. I've understood you for over twenty years."

~

_"Don't cut it too short," George warned in his usual, pestering way. "If you do, the flower won't grow back."_

_"It's a_ flower, _Georgie-bear," the girl complained, but she obliged and moved the shears up a little higher. She pretended to ignore the bright smile she received in payment. Even if it did make her small little heart do cartwheels._

_"It's special," her friend insisted, endearingly wide-eyed in a way that had to be intentional. "We planted it, remember? And it's even yellow, your favorite."_

_"I don't have favorites." It was getting more difficult to hide the twitching of her lips, but she was nothing if not contrary. "You wanted yellow, not me."_

_George huffed, recognizing a lost battle for what it was, before taking the shears from her and catching her around the waist. Around and around they twirled, his face hidden in the taller girl's hair and her shoulders shaking with the effort of holding back laughter._

_Someone pelted an acorn at them._

_"Hal," she growled._

_"Just keeping you on your toes, Simone," the older boy replied lightly. "Hey, George."_

_George‒ affectionate, happy, wonderful George‒ hugged his older brother as he often did. Hal leaned down, against his better judgment, and solidified his role in their lives._

_"She loves the roses, kid," he whispered. "She told me once they remind her of you."_

~

Simone laughed, a dry hacking thing, and leaned back in her chair. "Not enough, apparently."

If someone asked her, she wouldn't be able to explain quite why she was always a bit more cruel to Hal. They'd basically grown up together: her, George and Hal, the Three Musketeers. Moe and Larry and Curly. Their dynamic had worked famously, until the day it hadn't. Until they'd gotten a little older and a little more self-aware. Until it became evident that there was only room for two in the little world they'd created, with a third looking on from the wastes.

"You always say the sweetest things, darling," Hal replied in an affected Southern accent heavily seasoned with sarcasm. "Believe it or not, though, I didn't actually call to be verbally abused."

"Humor me," Simone deadpanned. "I haven't yelled at anyone in almost a week."

"Your problem," Hal continued, ignoring her, "is that you act too much like a machine and you've convinced yourself you like it."

Simone started pacing. _If you're not careful_ , the voice of twelve-year-old Georgie admonished her, _that snarl's gonna stick to your face until you die_.  

"You think you can do whatever you want and you won't regret it later."

"Shut up, Hal."

"But trust me, kid. You'll regret this. It'll haunt you for the rest of your life; you'll wake up in the middle of the night crying and alone, and you'll keep asking yourself whether you did enough or whether you just abandoned him‒"

"Hal, _damn it_!" Her voice echoed around her dressing room. It ricocheted off the piles of antiquated and meaningless junk that always seemed to collect when one wasn't looking. It blew right past the two figures who had just emerged from her wardrobe.

" _Get out,"_ she hissed, not noticing that it wasn't her star who was gagged and being bodily dragged into the room or that the old caretaker seemed incredibly close to a panic attack. She could distantly hear Hal's voice‒ ...what's going on, Simone.....is someone there...‒ but it was drowned out by the whirlwind that seemed to have made a home in her ears. She all but pushed the old codger and whatever girl he was restraining out of her room, slamming the door behind them with unnecessary force. She hung up the phone.

~

_It was dry, not at all what she had expected a first kiss to be like. The connection of adolescent chapped lips in such an impersonal way effectively destroyed every fantasy she'd never admit to having about first kisses and young love, etc. etc. It was relatively short, but it still felt drawn out and awkward. Her eyes remained open and roamed in any direction that didn't lead to his face. Her shoulder remained stiff under his hand, her fingers curled into the hem of her shirt and god, would he just pull away already?_

_A few scattered wolf-whistles did their job and he indeed leaned back in favor of evaluating her. Whatever he found he didn't betray on his face, but a more observant individual would have noticed the disappointed little slump of his entire frame. Simone gave him a tight smile, more of a grimace really, and started taking quick strides away from the kissing booth. She'd always hated those things. She hated carnivals in general._

_God, she hoped George hadn't seen them._

_Later, Hal didn't acknowledge the incident beyond a casual shrug when George questioned them‒ he_ had _seen, curse everything‒ and a flippant comment of how he would have hurt his reputation if he ran away from kissing a pretty girl at the kissing booth. Simone unceremoniously dumped her uneaten food in front of him before grabbing George's hand and carting him off to the Ferris Wheel._

_Hal sat alone for a short while before he tossed in his cards and began his solitary walk home._

_Two weeks later, when he noticed that George and Simone had started holding hands and disappearing into corners to whisper secrets to each other, he forced himself to look the other way._

~

She called him back, seconds later, and began with this:

" _Screw you_. You've always been a domineering, self-righteous bully, but this ends here. You don't tell me how to live my life, you don't get to condescendingly pretend you know what's best for me, and you _don't_ make the decision about what happens to _my husband."_

"And you're good with that, yeah?" Hal spat back, uncharacteristically bitter. "Good ol' Simone, always cutting everything and everyone off, pretending you don't give a damn about anything beyond your own nose. He is your husband, but he's _my_ brother, so forgive me if I'm not too eager to see him die yet!"

The fight, the righteous anger, the whole maelstrom of tension and pressure that had been building up since this ordeal began suddenly abandoned her. She collapsed back in her chair and faced her reflection. She kept her mouth stubbornly closed, letting her silence speak louder than her words ever could.

"I'm sorry," Hal eventually conceded, true to form. The man always had been far too nice for his own good. "I'm just not ready to lose him yet, kid. And neither are you."

"Don't really have a choice, now, do I?" She could count the number of times she'd cried on one hand, but sometimes, oh sometimes she envied those people who could break down at a moment's notice. It must be incredibly cleansing.

"You can choose to fight for what you love."

"God, you sound like a Hallmark card."

~

_"For God's sake, Simone, you've already made up your mind. I don't know what else you want me to tell you."_

_"Humor me, Hal," she pleaded. And, well. Simone never pleaded for anything. Hal sighed and wished, not for the first or last time, that he had her talent for turning off emotions and desires that would never see fruition._

_"You're more trouble than you're worth, kid," he grumbled. "But because I am literally the best person ever, I'll spell it out for you and everything._

_"You'll never be anything close to happy if you don't have George by your side. Seriously, you two are perfect to the point of sickening." She frowned at that, but didn't argue. She knew full well. Hal shut his eyes. He really didn't want to do this._

_"If he wants to go to L.A., there's nothing stopping you from following him. You're strong. You'll land on your feet. And he won't want to be there without you."_

_She smiled, slowly, and god it killed him how much she relaxed when hearing his words. But what could he do? He loved his brother._

_She hugged him, unexpectedly. She wasn't the hugging type, but Hal selfishly took what he could._

_"You need to find yourself a girl and sweep her off her feet, Hal."_

_She could have stabbed him with a knife and it would hurt less._

_~_

"He'd wait for you," Hal pushed. "He'd wait years for you to wake up and‒"

"No," Simone interrupted, finding solid footing again. This, she could do. She knew her Georgie-bear better than anyone. "He'd let me go. It'd kill him, but he wouldn't keep me hooked up to some machine that made my lungs artificially expand and contract."

Hal said nothing, but Simone was far too gone to crow over her victory. She stared at her purse, knowing exactly what was in there. She could see the year-old e-mail she couldn't bring herself to delete, from when Brady had insisted on doing a publicity run in Detroit ( _god)_. She could still remember kissing the little brown card she carried in her wallet in a rare fit of sentimentality.

She'd be the first to agree that life was not fair. Fair was not being stuck in the middle of the country in a theater that was literally falling apart around her. It was not being reduced to subterfuge with a old hermit who very obviously "wasn't all there" just so she could prevent her hapless star from fading into obscurity. Fair wasn't walking away from a car wreck while George was condemned to waste away in a hospital bed, without even any brain activity to call his own.

She wanted to scream.

"Simone..." Hal began. He was running out of time. They both knew that the minute she was gone from St. Louis she'd be back at that hospital in L.A. and it would all be over.

"You don't get it," she said. "If it were you, if your wife were being kept alive like that...."

"I don't have a wife," he pointed out, needlessly.

"Yeah," she barked out, bitterness and frustration at him, at herself, at the whole situation coating her words with venom. "For someone who waxes poetic about love as much as you do, you sure don't know anything about it."

Her barbed words lingered heavily, not the first but just as painful as all that had come before them. A disconnected part of her brain (that sounded suspiciously like George had that day they'd met, and after) scolded her, but she was a pro at ignoring things she didn't want to face.

"Please, Simone." It was his turn to plead now. " _Please_. Don't kill my baby brother."

She wondered, dispassionately, what would happen if she threw something at the mirror.

~

_It was a little frightening how easily she smiled when around him. George said it was because she finally let all those prickly layers fall away, but she knew better. George just had that way with people. He'd see the blackest of souls and he'd morph them into something that, if not beautiful, were at least presentable._

_She'd told him that, once, and he'd laughed and called her a closet romantic._

_It was difficult, though, to keep a straight face around him. Especially now as he flipped through Brady Armstrong's file in the passenger seat, providing commentary as they drove the long miles back to L.A._

_"For someone who never wanted to be a mother," George began, grinning at the file, "you sure do spend your time babysitting a large child."_

_"As long as he can act and put forward a face people are interested in, it won't kill me to tie his shoes for him." She didn't even mean that maliciously. George had that effect on her._

_"No, you're fond of him at least a little bit," he answered. "Little brother you never had and all that jazz."_

_"Keep going," Simone answered in the flattest voice she could muster. "You know it gets me hot and bothered when you spin lies about how good of a person I am."_

_"Hush," George commanded, lifting her hand from the wheel and kissing it. "I exercise my husband veto rights to outlaw that kind of talk."_

_"You sicken me," Simone answered, smile finally stretching across her face and lighting her eyes with some foreign emotion some people liked to call "happiness."_

_George continued to grin impishly, opening his mouth to continue his favorite type of banter with his favorite person, prickly layers and all._

_The mailing truck smashed his door inwards, blowing both passenger windows to pieces and flipping the whole car over._

_She was the last thing he saw._

~

"Simone," Hal tried again, more composed and ready to argue his whole case again. Simone watched in the mirror as her room was invaded once again. She didn't recognize the young figure who stepped out of the passageway, but she was beyond caring. She was beyond everything at this point. She let her expression fall into the permanent scowl that had taken residence since the accident and she summoned every negative feeling she had ever felt to come to her aid in this moment.

Really, it was all too easy to focus on First Prize and just not give a damn.

"I may have to cut this short, Hal, someone just climbed out of my wardrobe."

**Author's Note:**

> Challenge: Simone Mueller's having relationship problems with "Georgie-bear" and is talking about it with her friend Hal before Nancy barges in. Requested by differencedetective on Tumblr. Written for the Tumblr Fic War. 
> 
> I took some liberties with the term "relationship problems," but once the idea was in my head I couldn't get it out. 
> 
> The reference game for this is The Final Scene. This is un-betad, so sorry about any spelling/grammar errors.


End file.
